OIC Work Experience: Banking

OIC student gives his account of his week at Emirates NBD in London.

Here at OIC we strive to ensure our students leave us as not only academically gifted students, but students with real-life experience of the careers they hope to pursue. Our super-curricular team work hard with students to ensure they are able to get this experience with local organisations during the College holidays. This October a number of students headed off on such placements.

Here, a finance focused OIC student, gives his account of his time at Emirates NBD in London:

I had a family friend who worked in the company but in the branch back home in Singapore and so I contacted him after I found out we were to try and find our own work placement. He helped to get me in touch with the people working at the London Branch and, after sending in my CV, I got a confirmation of my placement just a week before the enrichment week began.

I felt really excited before the start of the work experience. I planned to do something finance related in the future, so I felt that getting a better insight on how the bank runs would be very beneficial for me.

During the placement I shadowed different departments each day, going from risk and compliance to legal to private banking to treasury. After getting a chance to experience working in so many departments, I now have a completely different mindset about how a bank runs and why they do certain things. I learnt quite a lot of different things, but one of the more valuable things that I learnt was the fact that because I was shadowing what they were doing, sometimes they didn’t have the time or could not bring me along to the meeting due to confidentiality. Learning to wait and find out things for myself has been one of the most valuable lessons I learnt.